I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupefy yourself.

Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance—to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you.

There were pickles in question.

Good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving.

For getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest.

And if the effect would last I might be capable of heroisms.

In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.

18Apr'63: George's 46th birthday.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

I'll trouble you for the muffineer, then.

“Rather sum up the three sorts of hatred in one,” said Francesco Cei, impetuously, “and say he has won the hatred of all men who have sense and honesty, by inventing hypocritical lies. His proper place is among the false prophets in the Inferno, who walk with their heads turned hind-foremost.”

Convinced that this must be carelessness, since it transcended the bounds of possible stupidity.

“Oh, I know what you’ve been doing,” said Tom; “you’ve been reading the English at the end. Any donkey can do that.”

Puzzling world.

Mors omnibus est communis would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin.

I shall go first to the court of Hungary, where scholars are eminently welcome.

Continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium of uninteresting or unintelligible ideas.

though on a strictly impartial view the blame ought rather to lie with the previous weight of feathers which had already placed the back in such imminent peril that an otherwise innocent feather could not settle on it without mischief.

Comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or discredit of breaking the camel’s back,

For the first time she quite forgot that she had a load on her mind.

The tonic effect of etymology.

After all, she is a trump.

But I call him a hypocrite, who wants to be master of everybody, and get himself made Pope.

I have observed that for getting a strong impression that a skein is tangled there is nothing like snatching hastily at a single thread.

Do believe in my love for you and that it will remain as long as I have my senses, because it is interwoven with my best nature and is dependent, not on any accidents of manner but on long experience which has confirmed the instinctive attraction of earlier days.

There’s one sort of fellow sees nothing but the end of his own nose, and another sort that sees nothing but the hinder side of the moon.

Mr Tulliver was not by any means an exception in mistaking brazenness for shrewdness.

Mrs Glegg emitted a long sort of gutteral sound with closed lips that smiled in mingled pity and scorn.

When people were grown up, he considered, nobody inquired about their writing and spelling: when he was a man, he should be master of everything, and do just as he liked.

Lost to almost everything but a vague sense of jam and idleness.